If you’re rich, there’s always opportunities to get to the top of the class

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Get Schooled page has recently published some essays that tell a lot about the different lives lived by many Georgians and Americans. The articles, perhaps contrary to their authors’ intentions, provide a clear demonstration that wealth confers great advantages on one’s prospects to go far in school and life.

The first is by JJ Anthony, a former associate director of admissions at the University of Pennsylvania, who is now associate dean of college counseling & academic advising at The Ensworth School in Nashville. This fall, the school will charge $33,110 in tuition and fees for grades K-5, $40,280 for middle school and $43,940 for upper school. They do boast that they provided “$5.4 million in financial aid to 226 students with an average award size of $24,000.” These awards come from 18 different funds built into the school’s generous endowment, to which the school website encourages you to donate.

Anthony wrote private school students may no longer need a private school education. Rather, country clubs can install artificial intelligence instruction, allowing parents to drop their kids off at the education center and play golf all day. Some luxury country clubs may charge as much as $500,000 to join, and $5,000-$12,000 in monthly fees. That teacherless AI education for the kids might really absorb the pain of those fees.

Peter Smagorinsky is a retired professor at The University of Georgia, an inductee in the Reading Hall of Fame, and former co-editor of Research in the Teaching of English. (Contributed photo)

I can see why some parents would prefer to pay nothing for education, even with those fees now subsidized by you and me through voucher programs. When the country club serves as both your babysitter and your education system while you head out to the links, you truly sit on top of the world. It’s not clear how they are earning their cash by playing so much golf, but as a lifelong teacher, I can’t afford to learn how they pull it off.

But then, maybe there won’t be any teachers before long anyhow. The National Bureau of Economic Research reports that in 1970, my first year of college, almost 20% of college freshmen saw teaching as a possible career. Today? It’s under 5%. Unless AI, too, decides that the work isn’t worth the pay, it might indeed be the future of education.

A second column of interest is by Eric Greenberg, the founder and president of the Greenberg Educational Group. His business specializes in “strategic college advising/application essay assistance, test prep and academic tutoring” beginning in elementary school. I searched their website for a fee schedule, but none is posted. I’m pretty sure that these services are not free. (Greenberg said the company offers a sliding scale fee based on demonstrated financial need and different pricing options.) Students have access to every imaginable form of support, perhaps freeing their parents to play more golf. With such comprehensive academic support, Greenberg’s clients then go off, according to his website, to the nation’s finest, most elite and most expensive universities.

Several decades ago, Jonathan Kozol wrote "Savage Inequalities," contrasting the well-appointed schools in Winnetka, Illinois — a North Shore of Chicago community with a median home sales value of $2,449,000, per Realtor.com — and those of East St. Louis, a deeply impoverished city in southern Illinois. The inequalities he reports are dramatic and substantial, from simple amenities like clean drinking water in homes and schools to the general maintenance of the school facilities.

Kozol’s book is not current, but the economic divide is now, if anything, far greater than it was at the time of his report. As one 2026 headline put it, “Wealth inequality in America just hit its widest gap in more than 3 decades.” As one AI summary put it, “In 2025, Savage Inequalities is not just a historical text—it’s a living critique of U.S. education policy.”

Here in the Land of Opportunity, some have more opportunity than others. It’s common to attribute success in life to grit and gumption. All are equal, but some are more equal than others. Some are born on third base and think they hit a triple, while others have barriers just getting out of the dugout, and are blamed for their struggles to get in the game.

In what some believe is a Christian nation, Christ’s compassion for the poor appears to be a quaint, obsolete notion. But if America is to meet its promise for greatness, it needs to recognize that providing even greater advantages for the advantaged is not the best way forward.

Peter Smagorinsky is a professor emeritus in the department of Language & Literacy Education at the University of Georgia.